Crosssports's Weblog

Howdy folks,

Are you prepared for the arrival of our Taco Truck overlords?

Personally, I’m hoping to land a spot toiling in the salsa mines.

In the meantime, though, I guess I’ll continue to write about cyclocross!

So, it’s Saturday of Labor Day Weekend. Some of ya’all are going to be racing in the next couple of days (wow… is the season really here already?!?)

Up here in Seattle, race day this weekend is Monday, which means if you’re racing it, you should be taking it kinda easy today.

Just how easy depends on how seriously you’re taking this race.

My suggestion to most would be don’t take this race that seriously at all, and ride a fair bit today. Especially if you don’t have much – or any – time in on your CX bike yet this season.

Use Monday as a training session, and although you’ll do openers tomorrow as you would for a normal race weekend (yup, we’ll talk about that in the next post) go out and get at least a little bit of work in today.

Ideally, go out and get some technical riding in on your CX bike.

If you haven’t been riding that thing much yet, definitely go get some reps in on the bike, and put yourself through all the paces of  a typical cyclocross skills workout. 

If you’re not racing this weekend, or if you’re feeling pretty freaking confident in your ability to recover from some hard work today in time for Monday?

Today you’re doing…

Sventervals – 

Sometimes a picture (or a video) is worth a thousand words.

Just like in the video.

Really darn short – 10 seconds max – full gas hill sprints, ideally on pretty technical terrain.

5 sets of 5 for today (you’ll build up to more) and notice how hard Sven is breathing after these?

That’s the idea.

Hit it hard. Really hard. These are super short, and super intense, but even though you’re giving them everything you’ve got, the idea is to do them on terrain that self-limits what you can do.

Can’t get up the hill anymore?

You’re done.

The fact that it’s dumping rain up here in the Seattle area should make these particularly… fun today.

Enjoy!

M

What’s that you say? You’d kinda’ like to have a cycling coach help figure this stuff out for you? Check out…

~ by crosssports on September 3, 2016.

Posted in Cyclocross, Intervals, skills, The Workout Of The Day